Posts Tagged ‘3arabawy’
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Jul
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Tragic Symbol
A Time interview on the racist murder of Marwa el-Sherbeeni…
The murder of Marwa al-Sherbini, a 32-year-old Egyptian pharmacist stabbed to death in a German courtroom last week, has stoked growing anger in Egypt, where the local press has taken to referring to Sherbini as the “headscarf martyr.” But with everyone from Islamists to the government claiming her as a symbol of their cause, Sherbini’s death is transitioning from shocking tragedy to a weapon of religion and politics.
On July 1, as a pregnant Sherbini prepared to give evidence against a German man of Russian descent who had been convicted and fined for trying to remove Sherbini’s headscarf and calling her a terrorist, the man ran across the courtroom and stabbed her 18 times. The attack has set off a wave of outrage in Egypt over what is perceived to be rising European racism and anti-Islamic sentiment. “What’s the problem with wearing the headscarf?” asks Ahmed Kiskh, a Cairo convenient-store owner. “This is racism against Islam, and ignorance about Islam.”
Adding insult to injury, many say, was the indifference of the Western press — German papers at first buried the story, while it took papers in other countries several days to pick up on it. There was also the added detail that Sherbini’s husband was shot and injured by a guard who at first thought he was the attacker. And all that was compounded by the initial lack of a formal apology from Germany. (On Thursday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered her condolences to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the G-8 summit in Italy). “Had the Muslim been the aggressor as the guards initially thought, the story would have made headlines … It would have perfectly fitted into the promoted image of Muslims being aggressive, barbaric and uncivilized,” wrote a columnist in Egypt’s main English language daily, Daily News Egypt.
In Egypt, the reaction has been impassioned — some would say extreme. When Sherbini’s body was buried in her hometown of Alexandria on Monday, thousands turned out for the funeral, raising banners and, according to wire reports, chanting slogans such as, “The Germans are the enemies of God” and “Down with Germany.” Sherbini’s brother told the Associated Press that the family would “avenge her killing” and The Sheikh of Al-Azhar, one of Egypt’s top government-sponsored religious authorities, called for the maximum punishment for Sherbini’s murderer. The Egyptian Pharmacists’ Syndicate has even suggested a boycott of German drugs.
Not everyone is buying into the frenzied rhetoric. “‘Death to Germany?’ Why?,” asks taxi driver, Mohamed Abu Maryam, who says he is dismayed by some of the responses. “Why blame a country for the actions of an individual?”
But for many, Sherbini has become a convenient martyr, an easy, emotional means to an end — or a distraction from Egypt’s domestic woes. “The Islamists in Egypt have already [begun] using this as a card to mobilize for the veil — not for the right of women to wear whatever they want, but in defense of the veil,” Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian journalist and author of the popular blog Arabawy.org, tells TIME.
Indeed, Sherbini’s heroic status in the Egyptian press appears in large part to derive from her determination to wear the headscarf in what has been painted as a landscape of cruel, racist taunting. Her death has also become the latest weapon in the controversy over remarks made by French President Nicolas Sarkozy last month, in which he equated the most conservative style of Islamic women’s dress, the burqa, with subservience. “This is cowardly act supported by many western politicians like Sarkozy … We should stand against such an inhumane act,” wrote one man on the message board of a Facebook group titled “Defending The Rights of the Late Marwa El-Sherbini,” which claims over 1,000 members.
But more salient than the women’s dress issue is the manipulation of Sherbini as a symbol of Islam in a perceived stand-off between the Muslim world and the West. “She is a martyr of Islam and justice will be served on the day of judgment,” wrote one man on the wall of another Facebook group, “Marwa El-Sherbini ‘Muslim Martyr.’” Even Iran, Egypt’s traditional adversary, has joined the fray, holding a symbolic funeral for Sherbini in Tehran on Friday, and summoning the German ambassador to the Foreign Ministry to hear Iran’s formal protest over the attack.
Some accuse the Egyptian government, too, of claiming Sherbini’s tragedy for its own purposes. The attention the government has given the case — called a “bloodbath” in the state-sponsored press — strikes many in Egypt as contrived, given Egypt’s dismal track record in protecting its citizens both at home and abroad. Human rights organizations and the local press point to abuses suffered by Egyptian migrant workers in the Persian Gulf states, as the government seemingly turns a blind eye. “The government is also trying to hijack the campaign and trying to present itself as patriotic in defense of Egyptians abroad,” says journalist Hamalawy. “What do they do for the Egyptians who are in the Gulf and who actually face similar treatment, if not worse?”
For the man in the street, Sherbini provides an easy outlet for Egyptian frustration — a distraction, some say, from the more serious abuses of an authoritarian regime. “The whole thing is just stupid. But it’s convenient,” says popular blogger Mahmoud Salem. “It’s an opportunity to have fake outrage because it keeps Egyptians busy.”
The ultimate impact of Sherbini’s death remains uncertain, but what’s clear is that Egypt will continue to hold the murdered pharmacist up as a martyr as long as someone, or some group, finds it useful to do so. “The debate could be taken in any direction at the moment,” says Hamalawy. “It depends on the actors on the ground . . . and how they are going to mobilize around it.”
Jun
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Tweeting Iran
The Associated Press reports…
An opposition activist spreads word of an upcoming protest in the streets of Tehran. Another posts pictures of clashes between demonstrators and police.
As Iran’s government cracks down on traditional media after the country’s disputed presidential election, tech-savvy Iranians have turned to the microblogging site Twitter.
Its use to organize and send pictures and messages to the outside world—in real time as events unfolded—was a powerful example of how such tools can overcome government attempts at censorship.
“When I’m not connected to Twitter it means that I’m disconnected from the world because the state TV doesn’t report many things!” wrote one Twitter user who identifies himself as “hamednz” and communicated with The Associated Press through e-mail. His profile says he lives in Rasht, a city to the north of Tehran near the Caspian Sea.
Like all the Twitter users in Iran who agreed to be interviewed for this story, hamednz did not want his identity revealed for fear of retribution from government authorities.
In Iran, as in many still-developing countries, Internet usage is mostly still a phenomenon of the affluent, the youth and city-dwellers—meaning Twitter and other networks are used mostly by the young and liberal—and may overemphasize their numbers while ignoring more-conservative political sentiments among the non-connected.
Supporters of reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi are more likely to use Twitter and Facebook. Poorer, less-educated voters have flocked to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone acknowledged the limited group of users in Iran, who don’t necessarily represent the mainstream. “Because Twitter is still a nascent service the sentiment is likely narrow,” Stone said in an e-mail Monday to The Associated Press.
“However, we noticed people creating accounts during the riots presumably because they heard Twitter was the most efficient way to discover and share what was happening in the moment,” Stone wrote.
Twitter had planned to go down for 90 minutes Monday for maintenance, but rescheduled it citing “the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran,” according to a notice posted on its Web site. The maintenance will instead happen a day later, when it is 1:30 a.m. in Iran.
Iranians must outsmart government blocking to use Twitter, on which users post messages limited to 140 characters called “tweets.”
Twitter and other social-networking sites remained blocked Monday in Iran. Users must go to other sites that post tweets for them and allow them to read tweets from others.
Facebook was used to organize people before the election, but it was also blocked after the vote. On Monday, the site was replaced with a message that said the page was blocked under a filtering policy.
“Since the election, we have heard reports that users in Iran are having difficulties accessing Facebook,” said Barry Schnitt, Facebook spokesman. “This is disappointing, especially at a time when Iranians are turning to the Internet as a source of information about the recent election.”
Cell phone service, which had been down in the capital since Saturday, was restored Sunday, but Iranians still could not send text messages from their mobile phones. Text messages are another way to tweet.
Judging by tweets since Friday’s election—the censorship didn’t even slow some of them down. Many then tweet to share their tactics.
“The fact that the government is not able to stop all of the information is really key,” said Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, a San Francisco-based digital rights group. “They can only sort of censor in a patchwork way, and censorship by its nature has to be all or nothing.”
Twitter has been used as an organizing tool to tell people about upcoming events such as this tweet Monday from a user identified as “alirezasha:” “today, 4pm a CALM protest with Karoubi and Mousavi/confirmed by Karoubi’s campaign manager and VP.”
Other users post pictures of protests or what appears to be government authorities chasing and beating protesters.
One Twitter user who identified himself only as Mohsen, speaking to the AP from Tehran, said while he’s been using Twitter for about two years, he’s intensified his “tweets” over the last few days.
He said he sends alerts about “what I see in the streets, about police hitting people, and people who are not police who are hitting Mir Hossein supporters,” he said. “These are frames of horror and hate. I think one of the strategies the authorities are doing is stopping news and information, and I use whatever I can to stop them from doing that.”
On Monday, the Twitter site showed topics that were getting the most attention, including “IranElection,” “Mousavi” and “Tehran.” In one 10-minute period, 12 users who identified themselves as being within 50 miles of Tehran posted Tweets.
Some media such as The Associated Press and others often monitor sites such as Twitter, looking for news tips and to assess the general mood.
Even Ashton Kutcher, one of Twitter’s biggest fans, has weighed in on the elections. He tweeted: “I think that truely (sic) the only people that can change things in Iran are the Iranians themselves and they seem to be speaking their minds now.”
Twitter has played a role in other world political events. This April, protesters of parliamentary elections in Moldova used Twitter and the Internet when mobile phones and cable news television stations went down. They rallied as many as 10,000 people to one demonstration.
Earlier this month, government censors in China shut down Twitter as well as other social networking and image-sharing Web sites as part of their attempt to block out news about the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
But some experts warn of overestimating Twitter’s role. Censorship adds another layer of technology that people have to overcome.
For people following events in Iran from abroad on Twitter, it’s easy to think that everyone is an outraged Mousavi supporter.
“If you follow Twitter you will think that Tehran is going through another …. revolution,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, an Egyptian blogger and activist who often uses Twitter. “And that’s not the case.”
Even Mohsen, who uses Twitter from Iran, said Twitter is seen by many Iranians as a professional tool for journalists and bloggers.
Gaurav Mishra, the 2008-09 Yahoo Fellow at Georgetown University, said he hasn’t seen any evidence in past events such as the Moldova elections that Twitter was the dominant way people are organizing.
“It’s sometimes difficult to differentiate the hype from the media,” he said. “Just because people are tweeting about something doesn’t mean that there’s actually coordination involved.”
Jun
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Radio Interview: Arab Talk Show
Interview recorded on Thursday 4th of June…
Jun
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Dissenting Voices in Arab Blogosphere
The New York Times News Blog reports…
If, like The Lede, you followed the State Department’s global live Web chat immediately after President Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Cairo this morning, you might have gotten the impression that an era of peace and good will was at hand.
Tens of thousands of words of comment flooded into the chat room, seemingly from nearly every country on earth, almost all of them positive and some as gushing as this post, from an Egyptian named Nour: “WE WANT OBAMA TO RULE EGYPT.”
It was not hard, however, to find more sober perspectives from some Arab bloggers writing in English. One was Hossam el-Hamalawy, a blogger and journalist in Cairo whose Op-Ed essay in The Times this week suggested that President Obama’s visit to Egypt was “a clear endorsement of President Hosni Mubarak, the ailing 81-year-old dictator who has ruled with martial law, secret police and torture chambers.” Mr. Hamalawy posted a stream of lacerating, often obscene commentary about Mr. Obama’s speech on his Twitter feed in real time, calling the speech “patronizing” and “cheesy” and saying it “could have been delivered by Bush or Clinton.” When Mr. Obama spoke of education, Mr. Hamalawy tweeted:
More scholarships for Muslim Students in America. Great! I need to study Hypocrisology in DC. They r good at it.
When the American president said Israeli settlement-building had to stop, Mr. Hamalawy responded:
Empty rhetoric about Israeli settlements. He says they must stop, but not dismantling what has been built already.
When Mr. Obama spoke of Al Qaeda’s violent extremism, Mr. Hamalawy replied:
Obama, Your govt have killed more people than Al-Qaeda did! So shut up!
Mr. Hamalawy also amplified and echoed the comments of other Twitter users who heaped scorn upon the speech, like this comment from the similarly unimpressed Wael Khalil: “same old Holocaust justification for Israel. Dude, it wasn’t us, it was the Germans.”
As’ad AbuKhalil, a visiting professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, who blogs as the “Angry Arab,” was not much happier with the speech. In a preview on Wednesday, Mr. AbuKhalil wrote on his blog:
What can you say about Obama? It will — and should — be remembered that he praised the “wisdom” of the Saudi King. What is next? Will he praise the public beheadings in the kingdom as example of ideal justice?
After the event, he wrote in a long post headlined, “Obama Speech: Part Vapid and Part Sinister,” that Mr. Obama “is not a man of courage,” for failing to say that Al-Azhar University was more “progressive under Nasser than Sadat or Mubarak. But, agreeing with Mr. Hamalawy and Mr. Khalil, Mr. AbuKhalil was most upset about Mr. Obama’s remarks on the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis:
I was offended by his lecturing to Muslims about Jewish suffering: as if the audience is entirely anti-Semitic. There are anti-Semites in the US and he does not lecture to them. He spoke about the repugnant practice of Holocaust denial but did not mention that the literature is entirely Western in that regard. And he then moves from a discussion of the Nazism to the Arab-Israeli conflict. What is his point here: that because of Nazi crimes, the Palestinians need to accommodate Zionist crimes on their lands? This is the most offensive section of course: he talks about the Palestinians without identifying who was doing those bad things to them.
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"Stop quoting the Quran, dude! That's really cheesy."
Chorus of tweets greets Obama speech, the BBC reports…
Jun
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Interview with Dave Ross Show: Egypt's Ruling Thugs
My interview on the Dave Ross Show…
Jun
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ABOUT 3ARABAWY
Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist from Cairo
hossam [at] arabawy [dot] org
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